Who is Trenton Talbot?

• Wedding, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, Corporate Event and Portrait photographer based in Marietta, GA. Hopefully I am the guy who will be creating some spectacular photos for you!

I’ve finally relocated back to Atlanta area after spending six years in Europe.

…Last time I asked one of my clients how to best describe my style, I was told that her photographs were candid, captivating and offbeat with a hint of mischief. She’s a fine wine connoisseur, can’t you tell? Her husband called my style quirky. Hipsters, what do you know.

I like to think that I’m efficient at finding the holy grail of documentary photography, the “decisive moment” – every single time. I’ve been perfecting my PJ style for decades and reached the point where the skill of “blending in”, becoming ubiquitous yet invisible morphed into a habit. My working style gravitates towards documenting the natural flow of your celebration.

But there’s a flip side: every once in a while, merely capturing what’s in front of me just doesn’t cut it. Sometimes I have to shatter the ambience and create a peculiar mix of light and shadows, divergent colors, delivering a brand new reality. I do all this at the set, not in Photoshop – so we’re creating a reality, not faking it.

What else?

I’ve been told that I make unphotogenic models look great. Well, maybe. Or maybe grumpy people just never hire me. Happy people are always photogenic.

Photography is what I do for a living, so it’s my ultimate goal to ascertain your needs and do my best to meet them in a way that suits you and is beneficial to us both.

I love working with kids of all ages. Their spontaneity and youthful excitement makes their portrait sessions and bar mitzvahs such a blast! Many adults fit into that category as well.

FAQ:

For privacy reasons, the search function on my website doesn’t work for the client galleries. You need to go to the Client Portal and perform your search there.

Client galleries have 3 levels of privacy: public, protected and private. Public, as the name implies, is open and accessible without a password. Protected galleries (marked with a lock icon) can be found with search function or by browsing the list of galleries, but require a password to access the contents. Private galleries are 100% invisible, unsearchable and inaccessible without a password.

If you have a password for your protected or private gallery, your can use Password Access link to go straight to your photos.

I’ve had many websites over the years. When I immigrated to the States in 2000 and opened the studio in Duluth/Lawrenceville area, my website was located at talbot-photo.com (no longer live, but feel free to check one of many pictureless snapshots at the Wayback Machine). In June 2011 I’ve decided to move it to a new domain, matching my full name. It was a second year of my Russian odyssey that originally supposed to be a 2-month trip, so I knew all too well that I was stuck. However, originally this site was in English, as I had high hopes that I’ll be back soon (Wayback Machine sometimes forgets to archive images or formatting, so nevermind the mess when you check out this snapshot). A year later I had to rewrite everything in Russian to comply with the law and demands of my local clientele (snapshot).

In 2015 I’ve started switching everything back to English again, as I was positively winning the fight of getting myself back stateside. I also did a major redesign, which looks gorgeous on Retina dispays… But that last move also rendered most of my old portfolio obsolete. The new design needed extremely high definition photographs. Four megapixel shots from 2003? Forget it. Film scans? Not even funny.

So I had to cull my portfolio for the new website, trying to keep it fresh and extremely hi-def. That’s what you see now on my front page. I will be expanding it soon, and expanding a lot. With your help.

I photograph events pretty much all over the world. As a dual US/Russian citizen, I don’t even need a visa for entering most countries on this planet. So if your country is not on a State Department’s “no go” list, the answer is yes. If it is, then the answer is maybe.

I usually put my left leg in first… Just kidding! I wear black dress pants or slacks, black dressy shoes and a black polo shirt. If you feel the need to have a photographer who wears a tie at your wedding, please move on. Seriously, what’s the point? Blending in? With the gear belt?!…

Yes. There’s also an option to add a second photographer to any package. Keep in mind though that if your reception will have less than 50 guests, you’ll get a lot of photos with either me or the second photographer in the frame.

My packages do not include an assistant fee, however, I reserve the option to bring a professional assistant to help with equipment, portage, grips, lights and other tasks. Most of the time I work alone.

Story of my life is a Southern Fairytale

What’s the difference between a Northern fairytale and a Southern fairytale? A Northern fairytale starts with “Once upon a time…” The Southern fairytale starts with “Ya’ll ain’t gonna believe this shit!”

January 27, 1972 I was born in Moscow, USSR. The first five years went rather normal – you know, blending in, pretending to be from this planet, discovering that electricity bites, splinters hurt and dirt tastes nothing like chocolate. It all changed one sunny day when I received my first camera as a birthday gift. It stated “Scale focus” on the box, but grandpa misread it as a “School focus” and decided that it would be the most appropriate preschool gift. That has changed my entire life.

The same year we took that camera on a vacation. None of my family members knew anything about photography, so instead of getting sunburned I spent most of that vacation in a local library. Next thing I knew, I felt very comfortable with this manual-everything, no meter camera, shooting slide film. Not bad for a 5 year old boy.

Back in Moscow, film was developed, and behold! – most of the frames were exposed properly, sharp and had a surprisingly decent composition. The only “badly” composed photos from that vacation had one thing in common: teeny-weeny me in the middle of the frame. Thanks mom!

Next year I went to summer camp (a “Young Pioneer camp” as they used to call it in USSR). That particular one happened to have its own photo lab – rare thing for the Soviet summer camp in 1978. It took me about a month to learn how to develop film and work with an enlarger. Two months later, Sergey Vasilievich Ivanov, head of the lab, gave me full access and my own set of keys.

I started to spend my nights in the lab, unsupervised. By the end of the season I had red eyes, tic and a newspaper. Yep, the camp had its very own newspaper, now illustrated with my photographs. Unheard of back in those days!

…Same place, the following summer. A photojournalist from the Moscow newspaper came to our camp to shoot a story. He used a very cool medium format camera and looked extremely professional. He seemed very old and experienced, 18 or maybe even 20 years old. But he vanished without delivering his story to the paper, and to this day I have no idea what happened. Nevertheless, the paper still needed photos, and there was no one to replace this guy, so guess what? They hired a 7 year old to shoot the news story. So yeah, if you ask when I started photographing professionally, the answer may surprise you.

Let’s fast forward 15 years, skipping some irrelevant details like school, college, military service and other stuff of great insignificance. By mid 90s, my CV included work experience as a bodyguard team leader, system administrator at the nuclear facility, private investigator, software engineer and… photographer, of course. In 95 I was a contributing editor and staff photographer in a weekly newspaper in Moscow, part time photographer for a few local magazines and international news agencies. At the same time I was the only moderator of RU.PHOTO, photography themed “echo” group on Fidonet (pre-Internet) network serving some 30,000+ members.

Then it finally clicked: photography is my vocation. No more denial, we were meant for each other.

Few years later I grew bitterly tired of being a news photojournalist. Bread and butter of the news industry are made of blood and tears, wars and disasters. I’ve seen plenty, and I couldn’t stomach that bread anymore. Luckily, by that time a friend asked me to photograph her wedding. The results were nothing like the “traditional” wedding photography and referrals spread like wildfires… That was before the term “wedding photojournalism” was coined and became a fad. Ever since, I have enjoyed the bread, butter and meatballs of wedding and mitzvah photography – and I love it because it’s made of joy and happiness.

That’s how I got started in event and portrait photography. There’s more. For example – how I’ve immigrated to the States with my camera, a cubic meter worth of books and five bucks of cash. How I’ve built my business on US soil from the ground up to become a premier Wedding and Mitzvah photographer in Atlanta. How I was among the pioneers of FPV drones or flying cameras. How I went to Russia on a short family related trip in late 2009 and ended up stuck in Eastern Europe for six years. How I met my lovely fiancée and started growing a yeard.

But that’s a story for another day.

Ready to get in touch?

Recent Posts On My Blog

…And The New Blogging Format You know you suck at blogging when you count the posts in your own blog and find eight total… two being reposts from the archive. And what the heck is “higgledy-piggledy” anyway?!

NB: This higgledy-piggledy of a post mostly concerns my commercial photography clients, so if you’re not one of them… Well, you gonna read it anyway, aren’t you? A meeting planner recently complimented my work. She said, and I quote, “You are not like other photographers, you never freak out!” That […]

Hi, my name is Trenton and I’m finally out of the woods. It’s been three months since I’ve blogged anything. I also hardly sent any emails nor made any phone calls. Weird, considering the holiday season… With that in mind I want to offer an explanation and a quasi-apology. I […]

My six year long European odyssey is nearing its end; I will be arriving in ATL in early October. Arriving to stay for as long as I breathe… Yes, Trenton Talbot Photography will be on US soil, yay! And what’s a better way to celebrate (and reintroduce myself to the […]

You woke up in a strange place. You look out the window and see the Eiffel Tower. You must be in Paris, right?… Question is, do we have such a big fat landmark in ATL? Something that is so unique and so Atlantan that you’ll recognize it in a fraction […]